May 19, 2013

First-graders at East Ramapo's Summit Park Elementary wait in line May 10 to get help from art teacher Michael Bader. East Ramapo is slashing the elementary art and music teaching positions to save money. / Joe Larese/The Journal News

Written by

Gary Stern and Randi Weiner

Brewster's Garden Street School in 2011. The school has been closed as enrollment fell. / Joe Larese / The Journal News

School voting Tuesday

School budget votes and school board elections are being held across the state Tuesday. Voting hours vary by district. In the Lower Hudson Valley, four districts are seeking to override their property-tax levy caps. Those four — Ardsley, Briarcliff Manor, Irvington and Scarsdale — will need the approval of 60 percent of voters for their budgets to pass. Districts that are staying below their caps need only a regular majority. A district that sees its budget defeated will have one more opportunity to present a budget proposal to voters. Any district that does not have a budget approved after two tries will have to freeze its property-tax levy — the total amount raised by taxes — at this year’s level. Since all districts have rising expenses, any district that has to freeze its property-tax levy would have to make deep spending cuts by fall. Lohud.com’s School Elections Guide has candidate profiles and news coverage about the issues before voters on Tuesday. Find it at http://lohud.com/schoolelections.

Up and down

These districts are projected to gain — or lose — the largest share of students in our area between this year and next. Biggest gains:Greenburgh Peekskill Irvington Port Chester Rye Neck Biggest drops:Blind Brook Mount Vernon Pocantico Hills Katonah-Lewisboro North Salem Source: state Department of Education

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With school budget votes set for Tuesday, school officials have been trying frantically to explain the ins and outs of the property-tax levy cap, unfunded state mandates, rising pension costs and other bureaucratic annoyances.

But each school district’s fortunes also are being shaped by how many weepy kindergartners will be showing up in the fall and in subsequent Septembers.

School enrollments have been falling statewide, leading to hand wringing about demographic trends and speculation on the future of the housing market. The situation also is prompting hard questions about how districts — already squeezed by budget challenges — should respond.

“If enrollment is stable, it’s great,” said Diane Chaissan, assistant superintendent for business in the Croton-Harmon school district, where enrollment is expected to decrease nice and slowly. “If you can plan on the same number of classes each year, it makes life a lot easier. You don’t want it to be like a yo-yo.”

Growing districts often have to hire teachers and staff and expand expensive services. Districts where the student body is getting skinnier, though, may be able to shed staff and could wind up with property they no longer need.

A business group based in Newburgh released a report this month that highlighted declining enrollments throughout the Hudson Valley as a reason for school districts to consider regionalizing high schools or even merging districts. The group, Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, found that enrollment is flat or falling in 82 percent of the 94 districts in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess, Orange, Sullivan, Ulster, Columbia and Greene counties.

“There should be money in the (state) budget to look at consolidation,” said Barbara Gref, the group’s vice president of research and communications. “Why are taxes so high in New York? There is a lot of money going into education. Do we need to do something differently?”

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The study compared each school district’s peak enrollment in recent years — in the mid-2000s for most districts, but the 1990s for others — to its enrollment in 2010 and projected enrollment in 2020. Researchers used data from the Cornell University Program on Applied Demographics.

The report found that the projected overall enrollment for Putnam’s six districts would be 14 percent lower in 2020 than the combination of each of their peak-year enrollments. Rockland’s eight districts would see an overall 8 percent decline in students.

Westchester’s 40 districts, plus two special-act districts, would see an overall decline, but of only 3 percent. Twenty-three districts would see enrollment drops, but 19 would see increases. Westchester’s enrollment is more stable, the report found, due to immigration, higher-paying jobs and easier commuting.

Few young families

New York is one of only three states, along with Michigan and West Virginia, that is expected to see enrollment fall by 5 percent or more between 2008 and 2020, the National Center for Education Statistics says. About 80 percent of New York’s districts lost enrollment between 2008-09 and 2011-12, with the overall loss at 3.2 percent, the New York State School Boards Association found.

The key demographic factor is the aging of the population.

“The bulk of the population is past their child-bearing ages,” said Jan Vink, a researcher with the Cornell Program on Applied Demographics. “The share of young families is getting smaller.”

In New York, the number of people 60 and older is expected to rise from 3.7 million in 2010 to 4.6 million in 2020 and 5.1 million in 2025, the state Office for the Aging says.

Districts with fewer students are adjusting in different ways.

Brewster’s enrollment has been declining for a decade, in part due to lower birth rates, said Timothy Conway, deputy superintendent. The district closed an 85-year-old school last year after its enrollment declined from over 500 students to 377.

“We just didn’t have the same number of students,” Conway said.

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In Mahopac, which has 430 high school seniors but only 240 kindergartners, there are plans to rent the current administration building. A new full-day kindergarten program will move into now-empty classrooms.

With fewer students to educate, the Hendrick Hudson district plans to cut several elementary-level teachers in the fall. The district has eliminated about 50 jobs over the past five years due to budgetary pressures and has not hired an elementary teacher in more than three years.

“Going forward, we are projecting declining enrollment, hitting our elementary schools first,” Interim Schools Superintendent Brian Monahan said. “That will likely mean more reductions in positions but hopefully not in programs. Of course, we are hearing rumors that the housing market is picking up, so that may change.”

The tiny Blind Brook district is trying a novel approach to bring in more pupils to fill out its classrooms: marketing itself to potential tuition-paying families outside the district. Its pitch promises “a superior education in a small school setting.”

James McCauley, co-chair of New Castle Citizens for Responsible Education, a group that monitors school spending in the Chappaqua district, noted that it’s difficult for a district to find savings when enrollment is declining slowly.

“A reduction of 50 students does not mean an automatic reduction in classes,” he said. “But if the student population continues to decline, you should require less staff eventually.”

Bucking the trend

A few districts are bucking the declining-enrollment trend due to factors particular to the region, including immigration from Latin America and elsewhere, the closing of many Catholic schools and the longstanding attraction of local suburbs to Manhattan workers.

Most districts study birth rates, housing patterns and immigration trends, but they never can be quite sure what’s driving growth.

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“It’s hard to put your finger on,” said Raymond Sanchez, superintendent of Ossining schools, where enrollment has been on a steady increase to almost 4,800. “There are so many variables at play. We would like to think that the quality of the schools is drawing people here.”

Eastchester’s enrollment has surged from 2,319 students in 2000 to 3,150 this year. The district passed a bond issue in 2011 to expand the middle school, where enrollment was 181 students above capacity. The growth continues.

“As to why, that is harder to know,” district spokeswoman MaryEllen Byrne said. “But Eastchester is a desirable school district, and its proximity to Manhattan is a draw.”

Districts must consider that the housing market is improving as they weigh enrollment projections, said Lisa Davis, executive director of the Westchester-Putnam School Boards Association.

“When the economy tanked in 2008, housing turnover slowed down,” she said. “It’s such a big driver for school enrollment because turnover allows people to move in with young children. Now things are opening up.”

In Ardsley, a small village where the schools are the main draw, several new housing developments should lead to a larger student body, Superintendent Lauren Allan said.

“Real estate is moving now, and people move to Ardsley for the schools,” Allan said. “If our seniors are able to sell their homes, who is buying them but young families?”

White Plains saw big gains in the mid-1990s as large numbers of Hispanic families moved in. Immigration slowed considerably when the Great Recession hit because there were fewer jobs, said Fred Seiler, assistant superintendent for business. The district’s “Newcomer’s Club,” which helps students from other countries assimilate, fell by almost half between 2007 and 2011.

“Now we’re seeing that pick up a little as the economy picks up,” he said.

Larger, more urban systems are having to tackle growing enrollment alongside other weighty challenges.

East Ramapo’s enrollment has been growing by about 100 students a year, to nearly 9,000, due to an influx of special-needs students from Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish communities and of homeless students. The district has about 500 homeless students this year.

“Many of the other superintendents in the region have declining populations, and that helps in the budget process because your costs go down because you have fewer teachers,” Superintendent Joel Klein said. “We have the reverse.”

The 26,000-student Yonkers system is trying to develop a public-private partnership to rebuild and renovate its crumbling schools, in part because there isn’t enough space. By 2020, the city expects to be short 7,223 seats.

“Even assuming we could adequately repair them all, our buildings would still be too small and unfit for modern education,” said Joe Bracchitta, chief administrative officer.